SPOTLIGHT

Wynton Wonderland

The Apollo, the Savoy, and Minton’s might quibble, but the Cotton Club was surely the greatest of all Harlem nightspots, reigning on Lenox Avenue at 142nd Street throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Duke Ellington’s orchestra was the house band from 1927 to 1931—and, really, you can’t top that, although management came close by bringing in Cab Calloway as Ellington’s successor. The Harlem nights weren’t entirely cloudless: the club was Mobbed up and, early on, enforced a “whites only” policy where patrons were concerned; some of the costuming and presentation would make a modern audience cringe. (A 1924 ad in The New York Times touted the club’s chorus girls as “25 HOT BROWN SKIN BABIES.”) But let’s remember instead the talent that passed through the place. A hugely incomplete list would include: Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, Fats Waller, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, and Dorothy Dandridge. White entertainers, including George Gershwin, Judy Garland, Mae West, and Eddie Cantor, occasionally appeared onstage as well.

Now, 70-some years after it shuttered, the Cotton Club is returning, at least in spirit, with the new Broadway revue After Midnight, a “modern interpretation” of a night at the club in its high-Ellington era. The show, which originated two years ago as part of New York City Center’s Encores! series, is directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle (whose most recent Broadway credit was an excellent 2011 revival of Follies). The not-at-all-secret weapon is musical director Wynton Marsalis, who probably knows Ellington’s music better than anyone living and has put together the show’s band from his own Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. As you can see on these pages, the cast will include some fine surprises in rotating “guest star” roles.